About Me

Welcome! I am Gail (Banaszkiewicz) Carmichael, a faculty instructor and part-time PhD student at Carleton University. Download my CV and take a look around. If you might like to hire me to put together a computer science and/or video game workshop, camp, or course, contact me.

On December 15 2014, I passed the thesis proposal requirement for the PhD program. My research scope will narrow, and I will now focus more on the mechanics to arrange story events than their use in games specifically. I wrote about the proposal experience on my blog.

Gram's House is a research project I started several years ago with a prototype originally designed for Microsoft's Imagine Cup competition. Since then, a core team has formed around the project, and we just got awarded two NSF Pathways grants for the Advancing Informal STEM Learning program:

I have been hired by the School of Computer Science at Carleton University as a faculty instructor for a one year term beginning July 1 2013. I will be teaching a variety of first, second, and third year courses for both majors and non-majors.

I will be presenting a poster at GRAND 2013 for the BELIEVE project. This is the abstract we submitted:

Crafting satisfying narratives while preserving player freedom of action is a longstanding challenge for computer games. Many games use a quest structure, allowing players to experience content nonlinearly. However, this risks creating disjointed stories when side quests only minimally integrate with the main story. We propose a flexible, scene-based story system that reacts dynamically to the player’s actions.

In the proposed system, stories are defined within a graph where nodes represent scenes and edges represent causality. Nodes are tagged with information including possible locations for the scene, the plans or goals connected to the scene, and the agents and objects involved in the scene. At any time, the distance from the player’s current game state to nodes in the story graph is measured according to five dimensions of nonlinearity: time, space, causality, agents involved, and the player’s goal. The system will use the distance to determine what nodes should be available at any given time. Scenes will be modified dynamically according to when and where they ultimately take place, ensuring that each node has a narrative connection to its predecessors. This system allows for potentially connected stories driven by player action, leading to a more cohesive emergent story.

Are you a high school girl who ever wondered about programming? Or do you know one that might benefit from seeing what it's all about? Then be sure to sign up for Go Code Girl, a one day workshop being help at the University of Ottawa on April 20!

An article published online by Carleton University discusses my research project:

A team of Carleton researchers is trying to find out why so many computer games shy away from using nonlinear storytelling techniques – that is, techniques that help present stories out of chronological order. Traditional media like films and novels use all kinds of interesting nonlinear techniques, like those found in Run Lola Run, Groundhog Day and Memento. Many games tend to stick to fairly simple techniques like flashbacks, but more sophisticated approaches could result in more games with critically acclaimed stories.